As a matter of interest, does it seem equally slow when you edit a small world - a sandbox world or whatever?
This is just technical curiosity kicking in; and that’s a habit I should try to get out of, so feel free to ignore me. But I’m inclined to suspect it’s slowing down because your world is growing (and so, in particular, there are more entries in the drop-down lists of qualities, which appear in numerous places on each storylet page).
The ultimate point is that, if that is the reason, you might want to experiment with different browsers. Some mobile / tablet browsers are notoriously bad at handling complex forms, so it could make a difference. No promises!
[quote=Gordon Levine]No idea whether the tools are more responsive on smaller worlds, but PLAYING smaller worlds is exactly as sluggish.
I’ll try a few other browser options, thanks. :)[/quote]
At least part of that IMHO is that after each action, the left column completely refreshes, and takes longer to do so than the main column does - this makes it feel sluggish, even if just subjectively, and gets worse as the game goes on and there’s more qualities and items in your inventory. Fixing the code so that either
a) it only updates if something has changed, or
b) it only updates the item that has changed (better!)
would probably make the whole experience feel a lot smoother.
We’ve got a big ongoing optimisation effort going on which will make both front end and CMS faster (including exactly rhe change spiralx suggests) but it means some fundamental changes so it’s taking a while.
You will find that the CMS is slower when your world is busier. It is slightly slower with bigger worlds, but not perceptibly so - user activity is the deciding factor. Again, the optimisations will make a big difference here.
I use the tools in both Chrome and Windows RT IE (don’t ask), and some other Failbetterers use Firefox. It’s not strikingly faster in any of them, but as Richard says, mobile browsers can be weird[1], so it may be worth experimenting.
[1] which is in fact the reason that this won’t show up in green]
A suggestion crossed with a question: are there any plans for more detailed analytics? For example, being able to see how many people have played a particular branch or storylet, or have a particular quality at a particular value?
My main reason for asking is that I’m about to hack in my own ugly (though, hopefully, marginally entertaining) way of tracking players’ progress, basically by asking them to press the Like button when they reach specific points. But I’d feel a bit silly if I did that, and then a “proper” solution came along in a couple of weeks’ time.
(Separate post because this is a separate thing - apologies if it looks like I’m spamming the thread)
I’ve been thinking a bit recently about the initial experience, for people who haven’t played Fallen London or other StoryNexus games before. I’ve set up a new account and tried to imagine what it would be like starting from scratch. The good news is that in general it’s a really smooth experience :-)
There are just a couple of things I noticed, which might be off-putting during that crucial “first impressions” stage. They aren’t big changes, so I thought I’d mention them here.
At the top, there’s a lovely highly-visible “Help” menu with an “FAQ” under it. But, if you click that, you get sent to FAQs which are almost all for StoryNexus creators (the first one is “how do I delete a storylet”, for example). I can see that being confusing for first-time players. Maybe there could be some friendlier initial FAQs like “What is StoryNexus?”, or maybe that link just shouldn’t be there at all unless you’re using the creators’ tools.
Again exploring the orange menu at the top, I’m drawn immediately to “Buy Nex”, because I’m a suspicious person and want to know what I’m getting into. But the screen where you buy Nex doesn’t give any explanation of what Nex are actually for, so I can imagine myself being discouraged because I assume I’m going to be asked to pay to play. I think it would benefit from some generic text explaining that (in most worlds) you can do a lot for free - maybe based on the equivalent page in Fallen London.
(3. For what it’s worth, I think the page you see when you click “Create your story” is a bit abrupt too, and would benefit from a paragraph of general explanation before the two blue buttons. But that’s not really any of my business because it doesn’t really reflect at all on my world.)
Hope this doesn’t sound too picky… I mean, it is picky, but first impressions matter a great deal.
Dovetailing with above: the ability to include buttons at the top of your world(s) linking to relevant social media. (So: click a button, follow us on Facebook/Twitter.)
[color=#009900]No plans, specific or vague. FL has accreted a lot of incidental functionality over the years, and I don’t want to commit to porting every bit of it across - that’s all.[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)] [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]If you look at the rest of the roadmap, you can see some things that are definitely coming across, though.[/color]
I don’t know if there’s a way to do this and I’m just missing it, or if it’s just not implemented yet, but I could really use the ability to put more than one tag on a card. For example, being able to tag a card as the questline it’s part of, and a ‘beta’ tag for cards that still have the key of dreams requirement.
[quote=Hanon Ondricek]RR: you can do a card search by qualities required to look for KoD I think. edited by HanonO on 1/10/2013[/quote]
That’s useful for the example I gave but not so much for if I want to keep track of other things. Thanks for pointing it out, though, I don’t know how I missed that.
[quote=Roast Rabbit][quote=Hanon Ondricek]RR: you can do a card search by qualities required to look for KoD I think. edited by HanonO on 1/10/2013[/quote]
That’s useful for the example I gave but not so much for if I want to keep track of other things. Thanks for pointing it out, though, I don’t know how I missed that.[/quote]
For what it’s worth, I’d missed that you could do that, too. And it’s remarkably useful. Found a bug with it already.
Apologies if this has already been suggested, but I would love to able to view my most recently played SN titles from the toolbar, or perhaps easily access ones I choose to favourite/bookmark.
I think a variation of this has already been posted.
I know that the [q:quality name] thingies don’t work at the moment. but when they do, I would like to be able to modify the output in the actual storylet.
For instance: “[q:gender,the person,he,she] is a really sneaky thief. Will you help us catch [q:gender, him,him,her]?”
Branches into “help them catch a suitable fake”
“Turn yorself in” and other things.
The above example assumes that the gender quality is 0:nothing 1:male 2:female. With no possible numbers afterwards.
[quote=dewinduvae]I think a variation of this has already been posted.
I know that the [q:quality name] thingies don’t work at the moment. but when they do, I would like to be able to modify the output in the actual storylet.[/quote]
In actual storylets, they do already work. You can see an example in the manual (to find it you can search, rather thrillingly, for “body in the attic”).
The place where they don’t work is in QCDs - the messages you see next to a little icon when a quality increases or decreases.
But that, sadly, you can’t do. All you can do is to include the actual value of the quality, or its QCD (text description) if it has one.
Still, with cunning phrasing, that might be enough… lots of worlds have an “Addressed As” quality to allow NPCs to say “Sir” or “Madam”, and so on.